Contemporary Native American realities: in search of literary and cultural sovereignty

Neohelicon
Contemporary Native American realities: in search of literary and cultural sovereignty
Sanja Runtic´ 0
Marija Krivokapic´ 0
Timothy Petete 0
Neil Diamond 0
0 Faculty of Philology , Danila Bojovica bb, Niksic 40000 , Montenegro
On June 25-27, 2015, at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Montenegro, we organized an international conference titled Contemporary Indigenous Realities. Defining realities as attributes and circumstances that shape one's perspective, we focused our scope on twenty-first century phenomena related to indigenous peoples and received contributions from a variety of disciplines including literature, cultural and ethnic studies, anthropology, and arts. This volume, however, presents only the research dealing with Native American issues. The story about contemporary Native American literary achievement cannot begin without problematizing the often painful issue of identity. In the first place, we have to ask what Native American literature is, if it is a piece of writing made by Native Americans exclusively, regardless of the topic, or a piece of writing about Native Americans, despite of its author's origin, if the Native American topics are genuine, or whether it is their exoticity that ensures their presence in the literary market to suit editors' tastes. To answer those questions, we are led to another, more disturbing, set of debates related to the presence of Native American subjects in contemporary North American reality and their historical subjugation to numerous political and narrative marginalization strategies. To enable a solid ground from which to assess contemporary Native American realities-yet without an attempt to issue a political judgment or essentialize any party in the ongoing debate-we have chosen to open this volume with a group of articles discussing the burning identity problems that have powerfully affected contemporary Native American literary, art, and media expression and representation, as well as production in general. Every article strictly focused on literary matters in this volume suggests that to talk about Native American literature today necessarily means to trace its quest for cultural and rhetorical sovereignty, be it
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through the images explored or the narrative manoeuvres employed. For this
purpose, we will first problematize the dominant culture’s narrative of exclusion and
misappropriation through exploration of its set of, mostly insulting, images, and
then we will proceed to their literary elaborations in the works of some of the
leading Native American authors, such as Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Rudy
Wiebe, and Sherman Alexie.
The opening article, ‘‘The over-consumption of Native American imagery and
the ongoing results,’’ by Daniel Green from the University of Wisconsin—La
Crosse, United States, observes more than one hundred popular images of Native
American subjects whose patterns include primitivism, savagery, sex
objectification, buffoons, anachronisms, and stereotypes. The prevalence of these images can
be found in commercialism, sports, movies and television, literature and magazines,
toys, the military, and endless entertainment celebrities dressed as Native
Americans. Green argues that the popular Pocahontas myth and Cooper’s The Last
of the Mohicans, the cult novel that celebrates the Manifest Destiny, might have
been the instances that instigated the insurgence of these reified images and
examines the ‘‘cause and effect’’ of this indigenous phenomenon that is ubiquitous
worldwide. The misinformation, lies, stereotypes, and myths about Native
Americans have resulted in imagery, held by both Natives and non-Natives, that
is archaic at best and psychologically harmful at worst. This (mis)perception of
indigenous peoples has become American schema due to pervasive and myth-borne
legacy. Green relies on scholars from the fields of literature, sociology, and social
psychology who have measured the effects of related oppressive societal qualities,
always with the results harming the psyche of those so poorly portrayed.
Along the same line, Sanja Runtic´ and Luka Pejic´ from the University of Osijek,
Croatia, discuss the ongoing debate over ‘‘Washington Redskins’’ name and
imagery. Their paper, ‘‘NO LOGO!: Visual sovereignty and the Washington
Redsk*ns debate,’’ draws upon the controversy over the use of indigenous-related
sports emblems that has recently sparked a series of protests across the United
States. It focuses on the visual aspect of the debate, tracing the white-supremacist
foundations of the Washington team’s insignia to the institutional construction of
Native identity through popular Indian head pennies, gold coins, and buffalo nickels
in the period between 1859 and 1938. Pointing to the seemingly paradoxical
discrepancy between the minted messages and the systematic political, legal, and
military invasion on American Indian sovereignty in that period, the paper proceeds
to deconstruct the paradox by exposing the numismatic pictorial language as a
manifestation of the same ideological project and the configurations of power that
have remained unchanged to this day. The continued circulation of
indigenousbased iconography in the contemporary American context shows that the same
cultural imagination continues to serve not only as a powerful rationale for
European America’s historical, national, and political narrative but also as a form of
‘‘anti-conquest’’ that both obscures and enacts the established formulas of colonial
domination and control. Observing the alterations of the Washington Redsk*ns logo
design across some of the key socio-historical moments of the second half of the
twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the analysis explores how
various forms of national anxiety transcend into identity through the politics of
representation. In that light, Runtic´ and Pejic´ regard recent activism against
massmediated symbolization of indigenous identity as an important arena in which
centuries-old hegemonic discourses are contested against new venues of
selfdetermination and internal decolonization.
Runtic´ and Pejic´’s paper is followed by ‘‘‘California forgets. Luna remembers:’
Sensing contemporary Native American realities in James Luna’s performance
Native Stories: For Fun, Profit & Guilt’’ by Claudine Armand from the University
of Lorraine, France. Armand discusses how James Luna’s multimedia performances
are largely rooted in his culture and daily experience as a Pooyukitchum (Luisen˜o)
Indian living on La Jolla reservation north of San Diego, in Southern California.
Informed by a polyphonic style, they interweave, converse, and collide with various
personal, collective, fictional, and non-fictional stories and discourses. This fluid
and yet fractured approach incorporating visual, aural, written, and body language
directly engages contemporary viewers through the resonances and dissonances of
present and past, the physical presence of the artist’s acting body, and through the
immersive environment they are invited to share with the artist in the here-and-now
of the performance site. This article is based on the performance Native Stories: For
Fun, Profit & Guilt, which James Luna presented in October 2014 in San Francisco
during the Litquake festival, featuring Sheila Tishmil Skinner and followed by a
spoken-word monologue by Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a. It aims to highlight how Luna
senses today’s Native experience and how he mediates California’s present and
historical past. The play with metamorphosis, distortion, and dissonances, the
slippages in various personae, along with the combination of technology-mediated
devices, are some of the strategies he uses to trace the complexities of contemporary
indigenous peoples’ realities.
In her paper ‘‘To Ojibwe country and back: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
by Louise Erdrich,’’ Marija Krivokapic´ from the University of Montenegro proposes
a close analysis of Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, which she
considers as a piece of travel writing. Krivokapic´ looks at the book first through the
lenses of recent developments in travel writing critical theory. However, the author
argues that this theory, being developed on the theoretical tools of postcolonialism,
i.e. on problematizing the intentional perception of the Western travelling subject
and on questioning this subject’s almost innate adoption of hierarchical superiority
in relation to the travelling object, cannot vitally apply to another ‘‘conceptual
reality’’ in which these relations are nonexistent. She then looks into the feminist
reading of contemporary travel writing and concludes that its, often militant, stand
does not comply with a culture that knows child bringer and language teacher as a
woman. To pay due respect to the text in question, she also turns to some of the
Native American authored discussions on the difference of meaning of land in
contrast to mapping territory, of understanding the circularity of time in contrast to
the linearity of history. Finally, the paper shows how this book of travel defies
Theory and develops into a potent response to the dehumanizing semiotics of the
Native subject. The book is focused on the reality of people who once painted rocks
to tell stories and now write books and own bookshops, who once used cattails as
diaper material, but now engage their babies with toy computers while driving them
in their vans on highways. It also speaks of a legitimate decision of a female
intellectual to move and invest in her own kind of the Linnaean enterprise and, by
describing the living species of the lake in the Ojibwemowin language, to draw out a
special taxonomy, through which her people have always understood themselves
and, thus, lay the foundation for development of her own people’s discursive
ordering.
‘‘Ethnic identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water’’ by Jovana
Petrovic´ from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, analyzes the elements that
constitute Native American identity in the said King’s novel. In the novel, King
juxtaposes two ethnic identities—white Christian American, representing the
majority in American society, and Native American, representing a minority. King
portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada to define their
identity given the historically long rift between their Native heritage and the white
culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to
marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The
struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to
assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship.
King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and
forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their
position in both and usually not belonging to either. As Petrovic´ shows, by focusing
on the world of the reservation, Native American spirituality, tribal tradition of
storytelling, and creation myths, King juxtaposes Native American ethnic identity
with that of the dominant society in order to reevaluate the marginalized position of
the Native Americans.
Tijana Matovic´ from the University of Kragujevac, Serbia, participates with a
paper titled ‘‘Healing and recuperation in Louise Erdrich’s story ‘The Bingo Van’.’’
This paper approaches the story from the title as a representative work of the
author’s long-standing narrative attempt to use gambling as a way of addressing the
possibility of change in Native American communities. The protagonist of the story,
Lipsha Morrissey, is a psychologically disoriented young Chippewa man,
apparently focused on short-term goals, which ultimately reveal themselves as a corrupt
version of the illusory American Dream. Lipsha is otherized and, as such, almost
without resistance forced to accept the normative stamp of the culture of dominance,
as Matovic´ derives relying on Gerald Vizenor’s terminology. Lipsha’s healing
power decreases as he becomes overwhelmed by the materialistic drive fueled by a
prominent van-obsession. The sacred place is replaced with a pre-empted one, and it
brings about moral devastation to Lipsha. His subsequent recovery progresses
within a healing narrative, which brings about a waking-up into a restful nothing—a
landscape swept with a blizzard—such an emptiness being vital in what Erdrich
shapes as a powerful potential for recuperation.
Milena Kalicˇanin from the University of Nisˇ, Serbia, moves to Canadian
indigenous, social, and literary landscapes and discusses the relation of fact and
fiction in Rudy Wiebe’s 1974 collection of short stories Where is the Voice Coming
From. Kalicˇanin argues that the mere fact that this collection has seen numerous
new editions at the turn of the twenty-first century reflects its credibility in depicting
contemporary indigenous phenomena. Apart from exploring the complex
relationship of document, history, and fiction, the well-known title story depicts two
contrasted views on experiencing reality—the one that perceives it as a mysterious,
almost mystical experience and is generally related to the oral culture of the
indigenous peoples and the other one that rests on the allegedly objective factual
evidence of the white settlers. In his exploration of the conflict between ‘‘Almighty
Voice’’ and the North West Mounted police, which has been the subject of various
conflicting accounts, Wiebe examines the process of turning events into stories and
expresses his doubts about their historical accuracy. In that, he comes close to the
view of various postcolonial literary critics, who generally oppose the trend of
falsifying reality by relying on the objectivity of historical reports as the only way of
experiencing and decoding the past.
‘‘The devil’s language of Marilyn Dumont’’ by Vesna Lopicˇic´ from the
University of Nisˇ, Serbia, discusses another literary and social issue that comes from
Canadian ground. The article is meant to be a sort of case study focusing on
contemporary indigenous realities as represented in the poetry of Marilyn Dumont.
A Really Good Brown Girl is a relatively short collection of poetry published in
1996 by Brick Books. Lopicˇic´ was curious to see how much of contemporary
indigenous reality will be identifiable in the poems collected in a single book by an
author who is widely anthologised but not overwhelmingly popular in Canada. A
close reading of her poetry proves that Dumont touches on many aspects of Me´tis
contemporary reality such as the corruption of their culture, the problem of identity,
the relationship between the First Nations and the white people, living conditions,
gender roles, school system, etc. Support for Dumont’s poetic rendering of the
realities of indigenous people is found in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian
and other critical works. Lopicˇic´ conludes that social criticism finds its expression in
the poetry which is personal and yet a form of resistance writing.
‘‘Part-time identities and full-time narration as an absolution in Alexie’s The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’’ is a paper by the University of
Montenegro scholar Vanja Vukic´evic´ Garic´. As Vukic´evic´ argues, belonging to a
broad genre of Bildungsroman and a less broad literary form known as fictional
diary, this Alexie’s young-adult novel explores the implications of self-narration in
the context of a painful search for a more unified and solid identity within a
fragmented and stereotype-troubled social and political framework. The focus of
this paper, therefore, is not only the protagonist’s psychological duality, generally
inherent to the genre itself, but also the transformative power of the particularly
hybrid and culturally pluralistic narrative that, in this case, effectively combines
Native American and Anglo-European traditions. Drawing on the basic features of
diary as a form of intensely autobiographical writing, the paper aims at pointing to
its multiple therapeutic forces, as well as to the phenomenological importance of
self-expression in artistic, political, and existential terms.
As this selection of papers from the Contemporary Indigenous Realities
conference comprises contributors from a number of universities from Europe
and the U.S., a variety of current theoretical perspectives that encompass
postmodern, postcolonial, and poststructuralist approaches, as well as the disciplines
of Canadian, American, and American Indian Studies, we hope that it will attract an
expanding audience, provide fruitful ground for further investigations in these
fields, and instigate new challenging debates within interdisciplinary scholarship.